Hi, recently I was thinking about character advancement in Dishonored and XP system. Let’s see – there are two way to gain XP during the session – you gain experience from challenging the adversity (max 3 XP during session) and from achieving goals in the adventure (2-4 XP – page 79). So, according to the book, you can gain max 7 XP during one session. But, when we look at spending XP on page 80, you can see that most of basic improvement like increasing your skill or style by 1 cost 10 XP.
What do you think about it? Should the GM give less or maybe more than that? In my opinion, it would be nice to improve one aspect of the charakter after each session, which means you should gain around 10 XP per adventure. For me, in standard campain (with 3-5 sessions) it will give proper seanse of improvment.
And I am really exited to see new equipment and upgrades chapter. With blueprints and item’s upgrades, I think that equiptment can have big role in game and its upgrades can be alternative way of improvment your charakter.
Thanks
It really depends on how you want to run things.
If you use the oil trail as a benchmark you realise that each session has a relatively little between them meaning for gameplay purposes 7XP for a session sounds about right but if you want your character to grow more powerful more quickly giving more isnt a bad idea.
On the flip side if you want your players to feel like progression and character growth happens over long periods time and not just a couple days you can slow the XP gain down or perhaps reward them with XP dumps when they accomplish or go through something major from either a story or a character perspective.
Of course this is all my opinion and is mostly theory since i myself have not had a game together yet.
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So, the campaign I’m in has been going on for about 15 sessions now and I frankly think that it is all about the length in which you plan to play for.
For a long standing game like mine, we follow the rules for XP and each player will receive after any given session between 0 and 8/9 XP. It depends on what we did and how often we did it. On average we get about 2-4 XP per session.
For a shorter amount of time like you said, a campaign lasting 3-5 sessions should have a raise in XP or not very much improvement of characters can be had.
Like I said I think that it is very determinant on the players, the GM and the goals of the game.
Plus you are very right, the new equipment and upgrades should ease the dependency for mass amounts of XP
I’ve been running my own game for a few sessions now too, and that’s where I’m landing, but I’m forgetting about the achievements systems so I think I should be giving out a little more. On the other hand, I have no idea how long the campaign will go so I also feel like it should be a little more on the conservative side.
I think the XP rules in the book are a bit on the generous side, especially for a long campaign. I give out at least 3XP for each session, and I have created some side-quests and in-game-games that offer bonus XP, such as when I offered up to 12 XP for the PCs to catch a killer in Dunwall, but every day they failed reduced the XP by 1. By the end of that session, they each only got 2 bonus XP. You can make up for being conservative with XP by giving out more runes, bonecharms, and coin.
Currently considering ways I can tap the ‘Heroic character creator’ for advancement
- so rather then giving the players all those bonuses flat out or not using them, making a new player pick an Outlook at character creation, get a bonus of their choice then making purchasing bonuses from their chosen outlook cheaper then general purchases (Outlook: skill 5xp, style 5xp, Talent 5xp).